


Beloved Immortal

by cranberryapplesauce



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 21:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7591276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cranberryapplesauce/pseuds/cranberryapplesauce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate reality/finale based on a minor detail from Season 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beloved Immortal

**Author's Note:**

> As you might have guessed, I wasn't too satisfied with the ending of Penny Dreadful, so I honed in on a minor detail from Season 2. This is the result. Thank you for reading. :)

Strangely enough, the night creatures are no longer the problem.

The problem, Vanessa realizes one day, is that Sir Malcolm’s hair has turned from grey to white, and that he has begun to lag behind when their merry band rushes into that day’s danger. Of course, she thinks, this was to be expected; he was old enough to be her father - in many ways, he was her father, genetics be damned - but somewhere after the turn of the century she notices that perhaps the great explorer’s years on earth are beginning to catch up to him.

This isn’t really an issue for a while; he is more than capable of shooting his automatic pistol at whatever dark looming figure is attacking them at the time, and a few years later, when he can no longer stand and is confined to the stateliest wheelchair that Vanessa can buy, he occupies his time reading his books and consulting his maps, always happy to provide Ethan and Vanessa with whatever knowledge he can about whatever dark force they happen to be up against that week.

The young couple repay the favor by brewing Malcolm many cups of strong tea, pushing his chair up the hill to visit the graves of his family, and, occasionally, by saving the world.

He dies on an uneventful day in 1912, at the age of eighty-five; Vanessa and Ethan hold hands as they stand over his grave, and as they walk away, Vanessa swears she sees someone in the distance, watching Malcolm’s funeral as though afraid of coming any closer.

That night, as she finishes her prayers and crawls into bed with her werewolf lover, she makes another startling realization.

Ethan’s hair is beginning to turn grey at the temples as well.

Vanessa doesn’t say anything, at first - after all, she’s surprised it’s taken this long, what with the horrors she and Ethan have seen in their line of work and the demons they both face - but that all changes when she notices something in the mirror the next day.

Her face hasn’t changed at all.

In fact, looking back on photographs and portraits over the next few days, she discovers to her horror that she hasn’t aged a bit since she was a young woman - perhaps not since that fateful day in the Murray house before Mina’s wedding, when her dark life spun into focus in front of her. She had always thought herself lucky that she seemed to keep a youthful glow about her even as the years went by, but it goes further than that: her face shows no laughter lines, no creases from frowning, no dark spots. She’s well past the age of forty, now, and while she was always at least a little involved in her appearance, it shocks her that somehow she’s managed to escape the marks of time that have now touched everyone else she knows.

Wait, she thinks, not everyone.

Dorian is the last person she wants to see, but she finds herself knocking on his door on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. She has nowhere better to be, she says, and it’s true in a sense.

He takes her hand and leads her into his portrait gallery, and then from there into his other portrait gallery, the one that’s centered around something that would have terrified her if she hadn’t seen so much worse in her line of work. He offers her a glass of whiskey, then a glass of champagne, then a chance to make love, he says, “As only immortals can - free from the trappings of existence.”

She almost laughs bitterly in his face, but settles for a polite refusal and hurries out of his door. Whoever he is, whatever he is, she wants no part of it. And she doesn’t have a painting, or any desire to stay as ageless as she seems to be, so she spends the afternoon mentally berating herself for her decision to pay Dorian a visit at all.

She does make love to Ethan that night, as only mortals can.

She does her very best to put it out of her mind as the years pass and as they fight increasingly fantastical creatures, constantly keeping Lucifer and his brethren at bay. While Ethan shows no signs of slowing down, he does show signs of the life he’s lived - his hair turns completely silver some time after his sixty-third birthday, and she notices one moonlit night that the change isn’t confined to his human form. The 1920s come and go, and Vanessa makes him laugh when she starts to wear the new shorter dresses and finally casts out some of her high-collared lace gowns. They practice their dancing in music halls scattered about London, swaying to the new jazz beats. Ethan mentions more than once that jazz is American, like him.

He misses a shot when they’re in their seventies, and he almost dies from the bite wound that results, and only Vanessa’s herbs and quick thinking cause the infection to subside. She realizes that it’s the first time she’s seen his hands shake. She herself could easily pass for thirty, and when she takes his hand in hers she notices for the first time how different the two of them really are.

Somehow, they manage to save the world at least three or four more times before Ethan admits he can fight no longer, and Vanessa uses the vast fortune that has been gathering interest in a bank downtown to buy them a lovely flat, something far easier to take care of than dusty old Grandage Place. She tells the landlady that she is Ethan’s spinster daughter, the only one out of her many siblings who has agreed to take care of their ageing father. Ethan doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

She buries Ethan in 1940, right before the bombs begin to rain down from the sky. Their flat is obliterated less than a week after he takes his final breath, and she realizes that nothing ties her to London anymore. She purchases a one-way ticket to America, a place she has never been, and she feels a lump in her throat when the ship pulls away from the dock.

Vanessa rents a room in a grand hotel and immediately picks up the telephone. She asks the operator to connect her to anyone named Seward, or Clayton, but the operator finds no one with either of those names. Vanessa hangs up the phone when the operator asks if she’d like to learn more about a murder trial in the 1880s, and she doesn’t call back.

She sets up an office in Manhattan under the name Vanessa Chandler - the name she never got around to taking on legally - and quietly builds herself a reputation as a Private Investigator of the supernatural sort. She takes to wearing trousers more easily than she thought she would, and her desk always holds a book with a strange glyph on the cover, and an old-fashioned set of pistols. If anyone asks, she says that her parents got the pistols at an old Wild West show, and that she picked up the book on one of her trips back home to England. When she’s attacked in her office, which happens more than once, both the book and the pistols come in quite handy.

She practices with her herbs, she consults her tarot, and she knows when the forces of darkness will spring up again. That part is easy. What’s hard, she realizes, is remembering who she is. It’s remembering that she is not here on earth to be a passive observer, or to spend her time giving in to one hedonistic pleasure after another - a mistake, she knows, that Dorian continues to make - but to make sure that whatever goes bump in the night doesn’t affect the people who pass by her office on their way to work or the subway station.

She’s not sure whether time is passing more slowly or more quickly for her as she makes her way through the 1950s. She begins to pretend to have been widowed in order to get her male clients to take her seriously, but eventually gives up the ruse. Somewhere in the middle of that decade, she turns 90, to her great bemusement. She still doesn’t seem to have gotten around to ageing.

Vanessa comes to appreciate the changes of the 1960s and 1970s; she remembers, vaguely, being in the Banning Institute roughly eighty years ago, and her realization that she would never be the perfect housewife, or woman, or...what was it she had said?...cog in the social machine. She changes the location of her investigative practice, and forges a new identity as Vanessa Murray, another name she might have had if things had gone differently so long ago - oh God, she hasn’t thought of Peter in years. She watches on her newly-purchased television as the United States goes off to fight wars in Asia and as people march through the streets of New York.

She’s surprised by how much she comes to enjoy the Beatles. She’s less surprised when Lucifer’s minions come to her in the form of KGB spies, or when she learns that vampires are responsible for the tragedy of Apollo I.

It’s only when she’s walking to work one day, a bagel in one hand and a case file in the other, that she realizes she’s being watched. A blonde woman in tinted round sunglasses and bell bottoms breaks away from some protest or another - Vanessa has stopped paying attention to them - and rushes to join her on the sidewalk.

“Lily?” Vanessa asks, incredulously, and the blonde immortal nods and smiles, grabbing Vanessa by the hand and whisking her away to a small but comfortable apartment, where she rolls several joints and settles Vanessa on the sofa for a long chat.

The story comes out, of course, that Lily is the resurrected Brona Croft, and while she goes by Rose now - she admits she has been Violet and Petunia at different points over the years as well - she is happier than she has been in a long time. Victor, she reveals, died not long after he and Vanessa parted ways, back before the turn of the century - something about a lightning strike, Lily thinks. She’s glad that Victor never got a chance to make any more undead things. Since then, the blonde had been traveling, with a particular interest in helping women in need: she had fled London after the whole business with Dorian and had set up shelters, schools, and hospitals in as many cities as possible. She slyly admits that she stayed in New York to be part of the Women’s Liberation movement, which she claims to have started with some women’s movement just after her resurrection.

When Vanessa raises an eyebrow, Lily asserts that the only reason she hasn’t burned a bra at one of the events is because removing it would show the faint scar left over from her autopsy. Vanessa understands. She has a scar on her back - an angry cross of burned flesh - that she would like to keep covered too.

Lily and Vanessa part as friends, although neither can promise when they will see each other next - Lily might be headed to East Berlin soon, and Vanessa finds that isolation is a hard habit to break.

Vanessa loses count of the number of times she saves the world, and the number of times that she almost causes its destruction. The vampires never stop coming, and neither do the Nightcomers - she supposes that’s how they got their name. Somewhere in the 1980s, she runs into Dorian Grey once again, and finds that he hasn’t changed in either his temperament or his habits. Their actual meeting is brief, after the shock of seeing each other alive and unchanged after so many years, but it quickly escalates: after some accusations and revelations, he tries to poison her, and she tries to shoot him - and succeeds, thanks to a day with Ethan on the moors that she sometimes tries to remember and sometimes tries to forget - but he quickly heals, and she only manages to get rid of him once and for all when she finds his portrait hidden in the storage rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and burns it in Central Park.

She cries when it’s done - cries for the first time in decades. For all his faults, he had still been beautiful, and she had loved him once, so many years ago. That night, back at her apartment, she finds a grey hair on her head. She is 120 years old. She stops crying and laughs at her reflection in the mirror. She’s not immortal after all.

After over 60 years, she finally closes up the office of Frankenstein Investigations - the name she’s currently using - and leaves New York only a few weeks after the twin towers fall. She boards a plane to Cairo and tries to see what she can find of Professor Lyle - he had lived with a fellow egyptology scholar, she reads in his obituary, and the two of them had seemed happy enough - and then she tries to find Sembene’s grave on a mountain whose name she can no longer remember. She can’t seem to find it - it may have been marked, once, but that was well over a century ago. 

When she makes her way back to London, she orders a buttercream torte in a cafe and dedicates it to him.

Having not been back to the city since before the second world war, Vanessa spends some time wandering around and seeing how much it’s really changed. She doesn’t recognize anything anymore. Grandage Place has been divided up into smaller flats for university students. Dorian’s old house is occupied by a wealthy family with three small children and a dog. Doctor Seward’s office has signs in the windows displaying a restaurant’s takeaway specials.

A little research leads her to Catriona’s descendants, a brother-sister pair at Oxford. Neither seems too interested in their great-grandmother’s preferred field; the girl is studying theoretical physics and the boy is working on his doctoral thesis in Shakespearean literature. Still, they show her what they have from Cat’s old thanatology collection and tell her to help herself since it’s just gathering dust, and Vanessa walks away with a skull of unknown origin and a dagger that she figures could come in particularly handy one of these days.

It hurts more than she thought it would, visiting Ethan’s grave, and she wonders why those words give her deja vu. The headstone has faded almost past recognition at this point, but she remembers it like it hasn’t been over half a century since she last visited. She digs a shallow hole at the base of the grave marker and buries his pistols in it - whether she likes it or not, twenty-first century horrors have started to arm themselves with semi automatics on a regular basis (and that’s not even counting that one vampire with an AK-47), and she needs something more powerful where she’s going.

She whispers that she loves him before she walks away, this time for good.

Vanessa buys a military-issue backpack and loads it up with supplies, including her glyph book and an alarming amount of firepower. Then, she goes out into the street and waits until darkness falls.

The Nightcomers are there right on schedule. She takes out three of them with well-placed shots before the fourth one - a new one, definitely not related to Evelyn or any of the others Vanessa’s met over the years, and definitely the one who looks like the new leader - stabs a fetish doll in the leg and brings Vanessa to her knees in agony. If Vanessa had to guess, Lucifer was granting this woman enormous fame; she’s sure the newest foe has been a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent quite recently, and has done well enough to secure a lucrative record deal.

Two of the witches who hadn’t even bothered to join the melee pick Vanessa up under the arms and load her into what she thinks is a Maserati. They say she’s off to see the Master, and Vanessa rolls her eyes. She thinks she’s older than all of these girls combined, and part of her wants to send them to their rooms without supper. Or take away their iPads; she thinks that’s what parents do nowadays.

The Nightcomers no longer live in a dreary castle; instead, it’s a penthouse apartment. Vanessa raises an eyebrow at the leader, the singer, and the young witch shrugs, spouts off a trite reply about keeping up appearances and how horribly drafty the castles could be, and leads the prisoner up the elevator, where a man in a tuxedo stands in the center of an elegant living room.

The Master looks like Ethan again. Her breath catches in her throat. It’s not the first time he’s pulled this trick - far from it - but it’s been almost a century. And there was something about her handsome gunslinger - something raw, something genuine, something utterly tender yet utterly feral - that’s been missing from the twenty-first century world.

He snaps his fingers and she’s back in Grandage Place, back in her black high-collared Victorian gown, back in Ethan’s arms in front of the fire. She has to take a deep breath, because this might just break her heart all over again.

He offers her another scene, this time: she flashes to a modern-day world where the two of them, the team of Chandler and Ives, solve crimes and make love through the century Vanessa’s lived, and eventually capture one night creature after another in places such as the New York subway, or Dubai, or beneath the Sydney Opera House in a strange replay of the Grand Guignol. He offers to rewrite history, to go back and bestow upon Ethan the same gift that’s kept her 130-year-old body looking better than some who are a quarter of her age. Vanessa scoffs - it’s certainly not a gift - but the Master only smiles. He replies that Evelyn Poole, and Dorian Grey, had made certain deals that gave them their abilities. Vanessa had made none. He suggests that she think on that.

Of course she chooses Option Two, which is to tell the Devil to do a lot of choice things that propriety would have forbidden back in the old Victorian days. But when she’s done, when she’s finally rained hell and scorpions on these new Nightcomers and their wicked lord - the starlet’s death will probably grace the tabloids tomorrow - she decides that maybe it’s time to work on breaking the curse once and for all. And, thanks to the Master, she has a slightly better idea of how to do it.

She doesn’t have a driver’s license - who needed one in New York? - so she calls a taxi and drives out to the Cut-Wife’s cottage on the moors. When she crosses the stones at the front of the walkway she berates herself for not figuring it out sooner.

The cottage itself is still hers, as she sees when she unrolls the deed to the property, signed by Cromwell himself - really, she had been an idiot about the source of her immortality. It hasn’t been developed because it had never officially been sold or reclaimed, and when Vanessa finds a glyph of forgetting on the front stoop she knows that somehow the house has been waiting for her to return. Because she never formally filed Vanessa Ives’ death certificate, she is able to provide some DNA evidence to verify her claim to the deed, and she moves in only a few weeks later. She installs wifi and wears jeans and sneakers, but other than that she makes a point of keeping the cottage as normal as possible - well, normal for her. She goes grocery shopping for her stew ingredients, but she still finds many of her herbs in the forest (and orders certain rare ones online). The talismans hanging from the ceiling will never come down as long as she lives.

Vanessa chooses the new surname Clayton as an homage to the house’s former occupant, and lets the rumors in the nearby town start to grow. She’s amused by them, more than anything: in some of them, she’s a PhD candidate who has secluded herself to write a thesis on witchcraft - Catriona would have loved that one - and in others, she’s a lonely old woman who lost a lover in a recent terrorist attack. She’s an herbalist and a psychic, a crone and a maiden. Each rumor has a bit of truth in it, which she encourages, if only to spread her reputation as someone who shouldn’t be bothered except in times of need.

She’s incredibly thankful that the young girls do not start returning, at least not for that particular purpose - she thanks God for that. To keep herself occupied, she writes a book about her adventures over the years, and sends it off to a publisher as an urban fantasy. She laughs hysterically when she receives a significant cheque in the mail, and deposits it in an account so vast it barely makes a dent. Somewhere along the line she realizes that, despite being alone, she has found something resembling peace.

In the year 2091, a young woman makes her way across the moors, or at least what’s left of them at this point. It’s a much quicker journey than the one Vanessa had made over 200 years previously, especially as the new approaching Daywalker is riding one of those new electric motorcycles that have been becoming popular recently. Vanessa is more refined in her greeting than Joan had been, and settles for taking the woman’s hands as she crosses the ward stones and gets stuck. There’s pain in the new woman’s mind. Vanessa can relate, but says nothing.

Daywalker training has changed in the past few centuries - oh god, Vanessa realizes, she’s over 200 and could easily be mistaken for 60 - but the new witch, whose name is Amanda and who started her path to the darkness when she collapsed and saw visions of Lucifer during her A-level maths exam a few years ago, picks it up quickly. Despite initially scoffing at the “ridiculous” practice of tarot, she makes a few choice predictions early on that cause her to believe entirely. When Vanessa asks her to pick up some lemongrass at the shop in town, she replies in the Verbis Diablo without even thinking about it.

Vanessa puts the pieces together quickly and realizes that Lucifer stopped bothering her on the day Amanda was born. She keeps this to herself, but wonders in hindsight if the same thing happened to Joan two centuries ago.

Vanessa doesn’t know when or where or how, but she wakes up one day after a few more years - but really, what qualifies as a few years with a lifespan as long as hers has been? - and feels old. She doesn’t feel it in the sense that she’s lived a long time - if that feeling were ever to come, it would have hit her decades ago - but she feels it in her bones, in how her wrists creak when she adds an ingredient to her dinner recipe or how she’s suddenly very cold, even in the middle of July. Amanda has long since moved out of the cottage and into a house nearby, but she and Vanessa still call each other regularly, and on that day Vanessa sends her a message to meet at the cottage for lunch and a frank discussion. She makes sure that the glyph book and tarot deck are sitting on the table, and she makes absolutely sure to give Amanda the same warning she received from Joan about how using the book will turn a Daywalker from God.

For the first time in the years they’ve known each other, Vanessa reveals her age. Amanda’s face goes bone white - she’s learned from experience to trust whatever Vanessa says in Daywalker matters. Unlike Joan, Vanessa relays the possibility that Amanda has at least 200 years of life to go before she too can finally rest. She mentions where and when she’d like to be buried, if it comes to that, but she also mentions that she hasn’t seen a single witch on either side of the divide go peacefully, so Amanda shouldn’t worry if worst comes to worst.

She calls Amanda the Storm, whose power will sweep across the country and the world if she chooses. It’s up to Amanda, Vanessa says, whether or not she will become a raging hurricane of destruction or a powerful display of renewal. Vanessa chuckles when she reveals that her nickname, given in the midst of her own Daywalker training, was Little Scorpion. She doesn’t feel so little anymore, but she hopes she has spared the world the worst of her sting.

Amanda leaves for a new job in Berlin after another year or so - they’ve all started to blend together in Vanessa’s mind - and when they’re saying their goodbyes, Vanessa knows this is the last time they’ll see each other, and that Amanda is the first friend in years that Vanessa won’t have to bury. She hopes Amanda is stronger than she was, but honestly she doesn’t know. She scratches out the name Vanessa Ives on Cromwell’s deed to the house, and writes the young Daywalker’s name on the ancient paper instead. Afterwards, she brushes her silver hair and crawls into bed. She’s suddenly become very tired.

She wakes in the middle of the night to a face in the dark, hanging over her. She gasps at the shock of it, but then smiles as she blinks the sleep from her eyes and recognizes the owner. She greets Mr. Clare with a warm embrace, and offers him a cup of tea.

He’s been doing well for himself, in all the years. He’s gotten very good at disguises, and has gone by a lot of different names as he quietly published his poetry. It’s been enough for him to make a decent living, at least, and to travel the world. He admits he was surprised to find that Vanessa has been alive all this time, although, after her meeting with Lily - who, John says, has joined the colony on Mars, and appears to be happy in the emails they frequently exchange, having put their differences aside roughly 70 years ago - Vanessa isn’t surprised at all to know that John Clare’s story took the turn it did, all those years ago in Frankenstein’s lab. It explains quite a lot.

She needs a bit of help going back up the stairs - it’s as if the years suddenly all rushed to catch up with her as soon as she felt that Amanda was prepared for her own battle with the forces of darkness - and John takes her by the hand and tucks her into bed. She has a flash of a white room where he did the same exact thing, and where he fed her soup from a wooden spoon and brushed her hair on Christmas Day, and she takes his hand and smiles a wrinkled smile.

“You’ve done a lot of good in the world, Miss Ives,” he says. She can’t remember the last time anyone called her by her given name, and she squeezes his hand with whatever strength she has left over. As she starts to slip away, she’s glad it isn’t violent, glad it wasn’t a bite or a bullet or a raging fire that ushers her into the light. She’s even glad that there’s someone there holding her hand. She dreams of Ethan and Malcolm and Victor and Sembene, all laughing around a bright roaring fire back at lovely old Grandage Place. It’s a nice image. Ethan in particular smiles his wonderful smile in her direction, and when she looks down she notices that she’s young again, maybe not even thirty, and she lets him lead her upstairs at the end of the night.

There are three people at Vanessa’s funeral, as she’s buried to a worn-out headstone from two centuries in the past, in a World War II-era graveyard covered in ivy. Lily makes it back, flying in from another planet entirely, and she hugs John without saying anything as they quietly watch the gravediggers lower the casket. Amanda openly weeps, and then introduces herself to Lily and John as they finish throwing in handfuls of soil. They’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the years, Amanda says as they depart.

Vanessa can’t really see them through the fog, but she’s close by, she’s almost sure of it. The year is 2103. She was close to 250 years old, and, she says to Ethan as he takes her hand, she’s a little disappointed that she didn’t make it to that milestone. Ethan laughs a little, in his quiet way, and they are joined by their friends, everyone Vanessa has loved and lost over the years, and together they walk back to where the Lord is waiting.


End file.
